


Hearts in the Margins

by Colubrina



Series: Rare Pair Harry Potter One Shots [7]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Dyslexia, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-11-28 17:57:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20970674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colubrina/pseuds/Colubrina
Summary: Greg Goyle knows he's stupid.  Everyone tells him so.  Repeatedly.  So why doesn't Luna seem to notice?





	Hearts in the Margins

Greg knew he wasn't smart. He didn't even want to be. It seemed like so much work. He'd struggled with a governess who told him not to worry about it when he struggled with reading and maths. She'd touched her forearm meaningfully and told him his father and  _ someone else  _ would make sure he had a place in the world. Greg knew what that meant. He’d traced over the lines of his father’s faded Mark since he could walk. He'd coloured in the spaces until it has been a rainbow as his father laughed and ruffled his hair.

“Why are the lines so dull?” he'd asked.

“They won't always be,” his father would say. “Someday, you'll see.”

He'd managed to hide how hard it was to follow the textbooks at Hogwarts and learned to memorize what professors said even as he slouched down in his seat and pretended he wasn't listening, that he didn't care. School was for swots like that know-it-all Granger and smug Malfoy. He didn't need school, and if essays he laboured over came back with more red than black ink, well, he was stupid. That's what happened. He couldn't even remember how to make the letters face the right way half the time.

Sometimes when Malfoy laughed at him, he wanted to smash the boy’s nose in. He wanted to hit and hit and hit until it didn't hurt anymore. He didn't, though. He’d be special when things changed. He'd be special and powerful, but so would Malfoy. He'd never get out from under Draco Malfoy’s thumb, so he laughed when he was supposed to laugh and followed the prat around and fought his battles for him. 

It would have been nice if Malfoy had written his essays for him in return or at least helped, but that wasn't the way friendship worked, not for stupid, slow Gregory Goyle.

That was what he was thinking as he struggled to make the letters stop wriggling and line up so he could write however many feet he had to do, this time on transfiguration. He sat in the library and wrote things down wrong and wondered how pinched Professor McGonagall’s tight smile would be when she handed this newest proof of his failures back to him. “If you'd just take a little care, Mr. Goyle,” she had said the last time. “Your ideas are fine, and you seem to understand the material, but your handwriting is atrocious and your spelling unacceptable.”

He'd gotten a ‘P’. Draco had laughed as he'd waved his own parchment with its ‘O’ under his nose. 

“That not how you spell it.” 

He looked up into the grey eyes of the notoriously daft Ravenclaw and glared at her.

“Unless you're using a substitution code.” She looked suddenly excited by the possibility and, seemingly oblivious to an expression that intimidated even Pansy Parkinson, she pulled a chair up, sat down next to him, and leaned up against his side as she peered over at his essay.

Her hair smelled rather disconcertingly of treacle tart. 

“You are,” she said in delight. “You're swapping tons of letters.” She sat back and looked at him, and it was the first time Greg could recall anyone looking at him as if he were clever and interesting, and she was a  _ girl _ . She was a pretty girl with pretty hair and big grey eyes, and she was looking at him as if he were something more than Malfoy’s big, dumb goon. “Teach it to me,” she added. “I love codes.”

A streak of self-destructive honesty made him admit, “I'm not. I'm just stupid, and I mix things up.”

He waited for her to get the same disappointed glaze across her eyes everyone else got when they looked at him, but she looked puzzled instead. She tweaked the essay away from him, settled down, and began to read it. After a bit she touched one paragraph and said, “This bit isn't in the books. I read all the transfiguration textbooks to try to get a nargle to turn into a butterfly, and this isn't in any of them.”

He flushed. “I didn't read the book,” he mumbled. “McGonagall just talked about that in class.” He didn't ask what a nargle was. If you didn't ask questions, people didn't laugh as much.

She just nodded and went back to reading as much as he'd gotten done. Then she set it down. “Would you like me to write out a fair copy?” she asked. “I'll use the boring normative spellings and won't even add hearts to the heads of the letters that like them even though you could use hearts.”

Greg was about to say no, but she'd already started copying over what he'd written. She made him dictate the end, then blew on the ink, rolled the parchment up, and handed it to him. As he mumbled thanks, he looked down at her bare feet and blurted out, “Where are your shoes?”

“Oh, people take things that aren't theirs,” she said. “They come back, though.”

“Aren't you angry?” Greg asked her. 

She smiled at him. “Things sometimes come back better than they left.” Then she was gone.

He got an ‘E’ on the essay.

He started to watch her, a dirty sprite floating through derisive laughter. At first, he thought she didn't notice it. Then he realized she didn't care. When Malfoy laughed at him for misreading the Potions instructions – Snape rarely explained lessons, he just wrote recipes on the board and expected you to follow – he cared a little less than he had before. If a tiny girl younger than he was could ignore people who didn't appreciate her, maybe he could too.

She seemed to find him and casually copied over his essays, never adding hearts, never mentioning that his spelling was bad. When he told her the letters danced, she squinted at her magazine and said, “Mine never do. You're lucky.”

The letters danced a lot when he took his O.W.L.s, and he failed all of them. “Oh, tests,” she said when he told her. “The Ministry just uses those scores to find out who can be subverted to their agenda. There's not a single question on them about things that matter.” He watched her mouth as she talked about how nothing worth knowing fit on an examination anyway. She had an ink spot at the side of her bottom lip where she'd mistaken a regular quill for a candy one and tried to suck on it.

When things got bad and his father’s Mark became a dark nightmare rather than a child’s coloring sheet, Greg watched people. He was stupid, though, he'd begun to think, maybe not  _ quite _ as stupid as he'd always believed, but he could see when things went wrong. He could tell when things were out of place. He took a certain malicious pleasure in watching Malfoy’s fall from grace - years of kowtowing to the boy’s bullying malice ensured that – but he could see his own father was more frightened than pleased with events and the resurrected Dark Lord. He could see the members of this order he'd been raised to look forward to joining were not right in the head. He could see a certain blonde sprite was in danger. He could see she wouldn't listen to him.

He held her tiny hands tightly in his before she left for Christmas that year of the war. “Be careful,” he said.

“I'll come back,” she said.

When she did, it wasn't the way he expected. It wasn't on a train with students returning from holiday. It was to fight in a battle. He found her after, blood on her face and dirt on her jumper. Some hysterical part of his brain took over, and he heard himself say not that he was grateful she'd survived but, “At least you have shoes on.” He'd seen a friend burned alive. He'd smelt blood boiling away. All he could do was state stupid, obvious things. All he could do was wait for her to hate him, the boy on the wrong side. So stupid. So, so stupid.

She glanced down at her feet. 

He said, “I missed you.”

She did that thing where she heard what people didn't say and nodded. “I missed you, too,” she said. “Even though you don't put hearts in your margins and you should.”

“You'll have to take care of that,” he said. “I'm not good at writing.”

She put her hand in his and squeezed his fingers. “You're better than you think you are,” she said.


End file.
